President Obama’s decision to extend the war against the Islamic State, or ISIS or ISIL depending on who you’re talking to and what they call it, doesn’t seem to be going so well so far:
REYHANLI, Turkey — The U.S.-led air war in Syria has gotten off to a rocky start, with even the Syrian rebel groups closest to the United States turning against it, U.S. ally Turkey refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy.
U.S. officials caution that the strikes are just the beginning of a broader strategy that could take years to carry out. But the anger that the attacks have stirred risks undermining the effort, analysts and rebels say.
The main beneficiary of the strikes so far appears to be President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have taken advantage of the shift in the military balance to step up attacks against the moderate rebels designated by President Obama as partners of the United States in the war against extremists.
The U.S. targets have included oil facilities, a granary and an electricity plant under Islamic State control. The damage to those facilities has caused shortages and price hikes across the rebel-held north that are harming ordinary Syrians more than the well-funded militants, residents and activists say.
At the start of the air campaign, dozens of U.S. cruise missiles were fired into areas controlled by the moderate rebels, who are supposed to be fighting the Islamic State. Syrians who had in the past appealed for American intervention against Assad have been staging demonstrations denouncing the United States and burning the American flag.
“Everyone is angry with the airstrikes. For three years we have been asking for support, and now the West decides to hit only the Islamic State?” said Abu Wassim, a rebel fighter in the northern province of Idlib. The strikes are weakening the Islamic State, he said, but “empowering the regime.”
Since the outcry about the choice of targeting in the first days of the air campaign, the majority of coalition attacks have been concentrated in the three northern and eastern provinces governed by the Islamic State as part of its self-proclaimed caliphate, which stretches across the Syrian border into Iraq.
“Everyone is angry with the airstrikes. For three years we have been asking for support, and now the West decides to hit only the Islamic State?” said Abu Wassim, a rebel fighter in the northern province of Idlib. The strikes are weakening the Islamic State, he said, but “empowering the regime.”
Since the outcry about the choice of targeting in the first days of the air campaign, the majority of coalition attacks have been concentrated in the three northern and eastern provinces governed by the Islamic State as part of its self-proclaimed caliphate, which stretches across the Syrian border into Iraq.
U.S. officials say the strikes are working to achieve the core American objective — to degrade and ultimately defeat the militants.
“The airstrikes are hitting the targets they are intended to hit,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told journalists Friday. “They take out ISIL positions. They take out ISIL tanks. They take out ISIL weapons. That’s obviously helping,” she said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Residents of Islamic State-
controlled areas say the attacks have had a noticeable impact on the jihadist group’s tactics and behavior, forcing it to adopt a lower profile to avoid detection from the air.In their self-styled capital of Raqqah, the foreign jihadists who until recently swept through the streets in armored convoys, showing off American Humvees and other booty captured from the Iraqi army, now drive around in regular vehicles, according to residents. A wealthy neighborhood of spacious villas has been abandoned by the Chechen, European, Arab and other foreign fighters who had moved in. They have relocated to apartments in the city center, blending in among the ordinary citizens, residents say.
Elsewhere, the militants have vacated headquarters, checkpoints, command posts, courts and other facilities, many of which had been conspicuously painted with the Islamic State’s distinctive black-and-white logo.
From that description you might think that the fight is going well, but it seems apparent that what is actually occurring is that Islamic State fighters are adapting in response to the airstrikes, not so much that the strikes are rolling them back:
But the attacks have not loosened the militants’ grip on power, he and other residents said, or had any significant impact on the militants’ capacity to launch offensives and capture territory, as the assault on the Kurdish border town of Kobane has demonstrated. Over a two-week period, fighters swept unimpeded through a string of villages around the town. Only when they reached the town itself did the U.S. military weigh in with intensified strikes.
U.S. officials have defended the response to the Kobane battle by pointing to the broader strategy, which is primarily aimed at rolling back the Islamic State’s gains in Iraq.
“In Syria, the purpose of the airstrikes largely is to get at this group’s ability to sustain itself, to resupply, to finance, to command and control,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon’s spokesman, told reporters last week. “They use Syria as the sanctuary and safe haven so that they can operate in Iraq.”
In Iraq, however, the United States has allies beyond the borders of the Islamic State’s territories who back the airstrikes, including the Iraqi government and the leaders of the semiautonomous Kurdish region. At least in some parts of the country, those allies are in a position to dispatch ground forces to capitalize on the airstrikes.
In Syria, the strikes have highlighted the absence of U.S. partners on the ground. Moderate rebels grouped in the Free Syrian Army were pushed out of the Islamic State’s northeastern strongholds during fierce fighting over the summer and now have no presence in the areas that are the chief target of the coalition attacks.
The one front on which the rebels are battling the Islamic State, in the northern province of Aleppo, has not seen any coalition airstrikes, even though rebels say they have asked for them.
Instead, the Syrian government launched a new offensive last week aimed at cutting off rebel supply lines to Aleppo city a few miles farther south, forcing the rebels to redirect troops from the fight with the militants.
There was always going to be something contradictory about the President’s decision to extend his war against ISIS into Syria, especially given the fact that its ultimate success is so heavily reliant on the support and assistance of the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels. As the linked article makes clear, the rebels would prefer that our bombing campaign include attacks against the government in Damascus as well as the Islamic State/ISIS. The problem with that position from the American perspective, of course, is that attacking the Syrian Government at the same time that we are trying to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State is not really a strategy that is going to work well together. Weakening the Assad regime is likely to work to the benefit of the militants as it is to benefit the so-called “moderates,” for example, by allowing them to expand their territory inside Syria even as other parts of the area they are controlling gets hit from the air by Americans and other weaponry. Additionally, if we start turning our attention to Assad, then it is only likely to make the “moderates” less likely to pursue ISIS in favor of their true goal of overthrowing the regime in Damascus. So, in addition to strengthening the Islamic State to at leas some degree, going after the Assad regime would likely make it less likely that the “degrade and destroy” strategy will work any time soon since the ground forces we are relying on will be paying attention to the goal that they believe to be more important, overthrowing the government of Bashar Assad.
Another argument against the idea of turning this war into a war against Assad is the danger of what might happen if he is actually deposed. This is something that has been discussed virtually since the civil war in Syria started, and the picture of such as future is, if anything, even less pretty today than it was then. With nothing to hold them together, the various ethnic and religious factions inside Syria would turn on each other. Sunni Muslims against Shia Muslims. Muslims of both factions against the Alawaites and the Christians that form a significant part of the support for the Assad regime. In the ensuing chaos, it’s easy to see who the major beneficiaries would be, and it wouldn’t be the “moderate” rebels, who may not turn out to be so moderate themselves in a post-Assad Syria. The beneficiaries would be the very Islamic State that we are seeking to “degrade and destroy.” What this means, of course, is that to the extent the United States is doing anything right in Syria, and there’s very little evidence of that, choosing to not make the nation a two-front war by simultaneously going after Assad is the right choice. Indeed, whether we like it or not, the Assad regime is a de facto ally in our war against ISIS and there’s very little that will change that.
The important takeaway here, though, is that the air war against the Islamic State in Syria does not appear to be going well so far. Granted, it is less than a month old and we’ve no doubt had success destroying targets and ordinance. So far at least, though, it doesn’t seem to be deterring ISIS in either their advances against the city of Kobani near the Turkish border or their advances into Anbar province in Iraq and what looks for all the world like an effort to get closer to Baghdad, an advance that is leading the leader of the province to call on the United States to send ground troops. Meanwhile, car bombs in several Baghdad Shia neighborhoods today killed 43 people and injured scores more. I’m no military strategist, but it doesn’t look to me like the Islamic State is on the run.
